Readers Place

Tom Reiss interview/review

1. Who was Lev Nussimbaum? What was he really like?

In the 1930s he went around Europe posing as a kind of Indiana Jones figure, or, as I call him, the “Jimmy Cagney of the East.” The caption under his bandolier-and-bedaggered publicity photo in the New York Herald Trib was “Essad Bey-he hates trouble, but he’s ready for anything.”

He started out as a kind of jazz age/Weimar media star, who grew famous by playing up his exotic childhood and becoming part of café society with friends like the Nabokovs and the Pasternaks. But while most Jews in the 20’s and 30’s tried as hard as they could to assimilate, Lev did everything he could to make himself stand out.

In the cafes of Berlin and Vienna he’ d be sporting flowing robes and a turban. And he continued this wild career into the Nazi era, at times confusing the Nazis so much that he had Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry writing to defend him against another Nazi agency that wanted to persecute him as a Jew. He then went to Italy where he became close to Mussolini’s inner circle, cultivating a group that pushed a liberal, non-racist form of Fascism. He was either incredibly brave or incredibly suicidal, maybe a bit of both.

1. In uncovering the story of a forgotten man, you also uncovered a great deal of forgotten history. What are some of the surprises you found?

A lot of the American connections to Hitler and Mussolini are bizarre. One small example: Hitler’s first press secretary, Putzi Hanfstangl, was a Harvard man, class of ’04, and he used to play the piano for Hitler in the early 20’s.

Hitler loved marching songs like “Fight Harvard! Fight! Fight! Fight!” and was fascinated by descriptions of the hysteria of big college football games. Putzi, who later switched sides and worked for Roosevelt, swore that the Harvard football chants had been the inspiration for the Nazi “Sieg Heil!” chant-and that the concepts for the mass Nazi rallies came from his recounting of the frenzied Harvard-Yale games.

It was also amazing to discover that for almost a whole century before the founding of the State of Israel, there was this strong identification felt by many Jews in Europe for Muslims. Many of the early Zionists felt a deep kinship for their “oriental cousins” the Arabs, who, as Disraeli famously put it, were “merely Jews on horseback.” I talked with a Pakistani newspaper editor while working on the book, and he recommended to me the greatest English translation of the Koran, by Muhammad Asad.

I believe I gave him the shock of his American visit when I told him that the Muslim scholar and statesman he knew as “Muhammad Asad” was born Leo Weiss and was the son of an Orthodox rabbi who converted to Islam on a trip to Arabia in the 1920s. There are a lot of characters like him in The Orientalist. It’s history told in the lives of people who were too strange to make up.

1. What drew you to this story?

Many members of my family, of my grandparents’ generation, were German-speaking Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. When I was younger I tracked down neo-Nazis to try to find out what they were about, but I always mainly had fantasies about going back in time and confronting and outwitting the real Nazis. Lev had the temperament and, for a while, the luck to live out that fantasy. From the moment I first discovered Lev, it seemed like I had found a character I had been waiting my whole life to meet.

Also, I kept marveling at how somebody who was once so famous could have been so completely forgotten. In the early 1950s, John Steinbeck went to Positano, and everybody in the town told Steinbeck about this guy who had died there who they simply called “the Muslim.” And to read Steinbeck’s article where he writes with such puzzlement about “the Muslim” of Positano, having no idea that, just ten years earlier, Essad Bey’s books had sat in the equivalent of Barnes and Noble everywhere right next to Steinbeck’s.

How did you find Lev Nussimbaum in the first place? I had gone to Baku to write an article about the new oil boom on the Caspian Sea. But what really got me interested was what I’d heard about the city itself—like it was 19th-century Paris dropped into the desert, with old casinos, opera houses, elegant mansions, all in a state of gothic decay. And from the moment I got to Baku, I found it deeply poignant what a century of war and revolution had destroyed.

The city is half out of the Arabian nights, with medieval walls and minarets, but it also does kind of feel like Paris, with very dusty streets. There were no guidebooks to Baku when I got there. The main book people visiting Baku read was a 75-year-old novel, called Ali and Nino. The Azeris considered it their national novel, even though it had originally been written in German during the Third Reich. I started asking around about the author and found out that no one knew who he was, but everyone seemed to have a passionate opinion. The name on the cover of the book was “Kurban Said”—who was supposedly an Austrian baroness in real life, or maybe an Azeri poet who died in the gulags. By the end of my stay I had to get to the bottom of the mystery.

In an era when most Jews were trying to run away from fascism, what do you think drove him to work his way back to the heart of fascist Europe, when he had many chances to escape? In some ways, the world Lev grew up in resembles the one we may be facing now. The global order that had held for many decades was crumbling.

Terrorism was a fact of life. In a city like Baku, where he grew up, you had dozens of terrorist groups at work-bombing buildings, kidnapping people. Terrorism was in Lev’s own house, with his mother was secretly using his father’s money to fund Stalin and the local Bolshevik bomb makers. He was always running away from it, but he was also always running towards it, trying to confront it somehow.

1. You traveled to ten countries to do the research for The Orientalist. Tell us a little about your journey.

Part of it was searching through the archives of the secret police services who had been trailing Lev throughout the 1930s—they’d been as interested in his mystery, for their own reasons, as I was— so I could pick up some of their trails sixty years later. I found clues in notes left behind by the police and their informers-names and phone numbers that led me to people who were crucial to solving the mystery.

But the most fun part was some of the characters I met: The Austrian baroness, who would only talk to me in the middle of the night, when she wasn’t working on a rock opera, in her freezing castle, in the middle of winter! And the fierce old Austrian publisher who had hidden Lev’s deathbed notebooks in her closet.

She was one of the last people to see him alive in 1942, and when I asked her to tell me about him, she looked at me and said, “Well have you ever read his last novel-The Man Who Knew Nothing About Love?” Then she went to her closet and came back with the six leather notebooks, wrapped in a ribbon, and on the ribbon, there was a little silver locket, and inside the locket was this picture of Lev in the fez. The picture on the cover of The Orientalist was blown up from that tiny, cracked silver locket.

1. What happened to Lev’s deathbed notebooks?

I still have them, in a safe deposit box. I don’t know where they should go. Lev has no heirs. And they shouldn’t go back to the Aryanizer of his publisher – which is what the lady in Vienna was. I’m grateful she let me read the notebooks, but at the same time she absolutely couldn’t face the fact of what had become of the Jews who rightfully owned the company, never mind her Jewish authors, “who left without saying a word,” as she put it to me, remembering 1938, “leaving me to take care of their affairs.” So I hope some museum or library will start a collection of Lev’s manuscripts and will protect them and display them. They are an incredible artifact, the final way Lev responded to the danger closing in around him and kept himself alive-by writing.

1. You seem to have resurrected Lev’s life from oblivion. Why do you think you were able to solve the puzzle of his life after it had remained a mystery for so long?

I don’t think I’ve solved the puzzle of Lev Nussimbaum—in some way the man is just a Gordian knot of contradictions—but I do think I have resurrected him from oblivion and also resurrected his legacy from others who wanted to claim it for their own. An old Indian man who helped me restore the photos for the book insisted that I’d been reincarnated to save Lev’s life, to bring him back from the void. (He was so convinced of this, he absolutely refused to let me pay him!) I think it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime meetings of biographer and subject. I’d come along at exactly the right time-the last possible moment. It was as though all these ancient people had been waiting for decades for me to find them, so they could pull out a ragged photo album, a box of love letters not opened since 1952, or a cluster of deathbed notebooks.

The widow of one of Lev’s school friends produced a photo album that had survived a concentration camp and an escape through the Pyrenees, and it was filled with candid photos of Lev in his orientalist costume in 1920s Berlin. Often I arrived just in time to meet someone—if I’d come a year later it would have been too late. In England, I found the woman who’d discovered Ali and Nino in a postwar Berlin bookstall and done the first translation of it into English in the 1960’s. But she was in the hospital, having just had two strokes, and she was unable to communicate with anyone because she’d lost her power of speech. But then I tried talking to her in German. And it turned out that somehow, the strokes had knocked out her English, her main language for almost fifty years, but she hadn’t lost her first language, German.

She was shocked that she could answer me that way, and talking to her I found out that she’d changed her identity herself—she’d been a dancer in costume musicals in the Third Reich with an entirely different name. Part of writing this book felt like detective work 101, just following every lead, most of them being dead-ends since I’m dragging up a case that was closed a half a century ago. But every now and then I would have a breakthrough, and it just kept happening.